Saturday, 9 November 2013

Whitbread IPA 1945 - 1954

Seemingly never-ending series are my speciality. We're not even a quarter of the way into the one on Whitbread's post-WW II beers. Just as well they didn't brew as many different ones as Barclay Perkins or we'd be here until the next millennium.

I know what the reaction of style nazis will be to this beer: "not a proper IPA". But what makes a beer an IPA? Only a tiny percentage of the IPA ever brewed actually made the trip to India, so we can rule that out as a criterion for identifying an authentic IPA. Strong? Hoppy? Not sure they will do either. Before you start calling this a joke of an IPA, consider this: it was first brewed in 1900 so by this time had almost half a century of history behind it. How many modern IPA's have been around as long? That's right - none of them.

Clearly London drinkers weren't confused by the name. They knew what to expect when they ordered an IPA in a Whitbread pub. Are we going top retrospectively call them idiots because our modern idea of an IPA is different? Or accuse Whitbread of fraud for daring to call a session-strength beer IPA? Obviously that would be ridiculous.

But this beer belongs to the same family of beers as Greene King IPA, a beer of which it's regularly said "that's not a real IPA". Why? Because in the hundred or so years Greene King IPA has been around our concept of IPA has changed. More than Greene King IPA itself has, though undoubtedly it will be quite different from its first iteration.

So what makes a beer an IPA? It's as impossible to define definitively as the difference between Porter and Stout or what makes a beer Mild Ale. Why? Because the definitions have varied so much over time and place that coming up with a single one that covers every IPA can't be done in any meaningful way. You'd end up with something like this: a pale beer between 1030 and 1080. I think that just about covers every IPA ever brewed (excluding Black IPA). Anything more specific and it would no longer be generally applicable.

Before I go any further I should point out that this was an exclusively bottled beer, as many low-gravity IPA's were. It seems to have evolved as a specific style in the Southeast just after WW I. Very pale, quite hoppy, with a gravity of 1035 - 1045º. Barclay Perkins brewed one, too. The only surviving example I can think of is Harvey's. It seems to have occupied a similar slot to Light Ale in a brewer's range.

Now I've got that off my chest, we can discuss the beer itself. The 1900 version had a gravity of 1057º, a couple of points higher than average OG, but by 1902 had fallen to 1050º, a few points below average. Let me just stress that: this is a beer that was always below average strength. Here's a table just in case that isn't crystal clear:

One thing you can say of this beer is that it was always intoxicating. Even when the OG dipped just under 1030º, the high degree of attenuation meant that it was still over 3% ABV. 8.5 to 9 lbs of hops per quarter is a pretty decent hopping rate, not much down on the 13 lbs per quarter it got in 1900. Especially when you consider that the hopping rate of Whitbread PA dropped from 11 lbs per quarter in 1900 to just 5.85 lbs in 1945, a reduction of almost 50%.

The recipe was essentially unchanged across this period, except for the early years when they were forced to use flaked barley. After that, it's a simple combination of pale ale malt, crystal malt and No. 1 invert sugar. Apart from the one all-malt brewed in 1954. Don't know why they did that. There a few random beers dotted around Whitbread's brewing logs that are all-malt. I've not managed to note any pattern to them.

The hops, as you should be expecting by now, are all English, mostly from Kent. Oh, and some hopulon in the early years. Still not exactly sure what that is, hop extract or hop substitute.

I suppose I'd best mention that Export IPA. I only spotted it once in the records so it looks like it wasn't brewed very often. You're probably thinking that it's closer to a "proper" IPA than the standard version. But I couldn't possibly comment. It's pretty much a scaled-up version of the IPA, but with more sugar and less crystal malt. The change was probably to keep the colour pale.

the last thing I seek to do is find one defintion for everywhere and all time. In fact that's the very opposite of what I do.

I think it's very mean to push a beer like Greene King IPA, which has been brewed for probably at least 100 years, to the fringes, just because some brewers started making IPA's with different characteristics.

My way of looking at beer styles is that they are very much tied to a specific location and time. Which is why trying to force the modern American definition of IPA onto British beers is such a silly thing to do.

my problem with the BJCP and BA English IPA definitions is that wehen they were written, there weren't really IPA's like that being brewed in Britian. They were what the writers though an English IPA should be like rather than a description of the beers being sold as IPA in Britain.

Where they supposed to represent what IPAs sold in Britain were like, or what American homebrewers and craft brewers were brewing that were supposed to represent what they thought was happening in England?

If the latter, like with the Scottish Ales, it doesnt matter what was happening in the UK.

As a historical document, the bjcp (or any style guidelines) sucks. But they are generally a good representation of what homebrewers are brewing for competition.